Effect of 8-Week Lower Extremity Weight-Bearing Exercise Protocol and Acute Caffeine Consumption on Reaction Time in Postmenopausal Women

Objectives The purpose of this research was to study the effect of eight weeks of weight-bearing exercise and acute caffeine supplementation on reaction time in elderly women. Methods & Materials The research method was quasi-experimental with pretest-posttest design. The study subjects comprised 43 menopausal, inactive women with mean [SD] age of 55.69 [5.88] years who were randomly assigned into three groups of training (15 persons), caffeine (15 persons), and control (13 persons). The training protocol was performed over 8 weeks. The control group was not part of the exercise program. The body composition analyzer and simple and choice reaction time instrument were applied. Dependent t test and 1-way ANOVA test with post hoc Tukey test were applied to analyze the data. Results The results suggested that weight-bearing exercises had a significant effect on simple reaction time (sound) while it was not significantly different in simple reaction time (voice) (P=0.003, P= 0.003, and P= 0.09, respectively). It was also found that caffeine intake (2 mg/kg) had no significant effect on reaction time (P=0.12). Conclusion Weight-bearing training can be effective in improving the reaction time of the elderly.